Good morning,
U.S. stocks are poised to open higher Monday. Overnight mainland China posted solid gains; companies that had been suspended from trading during the turbulent market (paywall) rout are resuming, providing more liqudity; offsetting that — stricter rules on peer-to-peer lending that helped fueled the ups and downs of the market…. Europe also is posting solid gains with the Europe STOXX 600 adding 0.82% as Greece appeared to turn a corner on its crisis. (For now, anyway.). … On board to report earnings today: IBM, Halliburton, and Morgan Stanley.
Morgan Stanley handily beats 2Q earnings expectations on strong trading revenues. The investment bank reported earnings of $0.85/share, outpacing expectations of $0.74/share. Trading revenue came close to outpacing those at Goldman Sachs. Wall Street Journal (paywall)
Gold touched a five-year low after China released data on its gold reserves for the first time in six years. Gold watchers were shocked at the number: 53.3 million ounces, or half unofficial estimates. Now, of course, everyone is playing their favorite game: Second-guessing the quality of data from mainland China. MarketWatch
Happy ECB payment day, Greece. Greece is scheduled to pay the ECB $4.5 billion later today, a payment it could not afford to miss given that a default here requires the ECB to pull financing from Greek banks, ensuring a Grexit and forcing the world to see what Wolfgang Schauble looks like when he’s happy. Ekathimerini
Greece re-opens its banks after shutting them down for three weeks. Capital controls will remain in place as Athens negotiates the details of a third bailout. Angela Merkel says it may be possible to re-negotiate interest rates or maturities on debt. Reuters
Jet.com is looking bubblelicious. The e-commerce startup has a classic 1999 formula: Buy high, sell low; compete with the king of online discounting (Amazon), and raise $225 million, with the prospect of raising more at a $3 billion valuation. Tuesday’s official launch of jet.com should be quite interesting. Wall Street Journal
Barclays may cut up 32,000 jobs. That’s one-in-four positions. But the drive to reduce overhead is the lesser part of the equation. Chair John McFarlane has said in the past that he will be focusing on boosting revenue. McFarlane, known as “Mack the Knife” fired the most recent CEO Anthony Jenkins earlier this month. Bloomberg
Eurex opening delayed. Technical issues are apparently delaying the Eurex futures and options from opening today, and at the time of writing, there doesn’t seem to be any indication that it might open at all. First the NYSE and now these guys, what’s up with that? Bloomberg
Yanis Varoufakis wrote a book. Peppered with cherry-picked anecdotes and anti-German conspiracies, Varoufakis’ new book, The Global Minotaur, almost seems like a work of fiction in Giles Wilkes review. He does add however, that the ending may be quite far from it: “(d)espite this, his basic diagnosis may be correct.” Financial Times (paywall)
Best of read of the day — and there’s no paywall! WSJ’s Jason Gay on Olympian Caitlyn Jenner, formerly known as Bruce Jenner, accepting ESPN’s Arthur Ashe Courage Award. Gay writes: “Let’s be honest: Sports can be a brilliant catalyst for social progress—it happened with Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, Billie Jean King and Magic Johnson, among many others, and its crucial lessons of sacrifice and teamwork can ballast a lifetime—but sports can be a backward place, too. Antisocial. Mean-spirited. Bullying. The Wall Street Journal
Photo credit: sama093 via Flickr